


Supply Run

by darlingargents



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Awkward Flirting, Bonding, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Kissing, Mission Fic, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-24
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-28 14:25:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16725114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/pseuds/darlingargents
Summary: “It’s a supply run,” Poe says from under his X-Wing. BB8 beeps at him and he adjusts a little. “Better?” BB8 beeps confirmation, and Poe resumes whatever he’s doing. “Anyway — supply run. Pretty simple. An anonymous ally has offered us supplies and if it’s a trap, we trust you to get out alive.”“Thanks for that,” Rey says.“No problem. You’ll need a partner.”





	Supply Run

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheKinkAwakens (thekinkawakens)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thekinkawakens/gifts).



The new Resistance base is colder and draftier than anywhere Rey has ever been.

Well, that’s not quite accurate — she doesn’t remember enough of her childhood to know if she lived somewhere that had cold winters. But living most of your life in the desert, the heat creeps into your bones and doesn’t like to be threatened.

So needless to say, when Poe asks if Rey wants to take a trip to Kashyyyk — mid-summer on a jungle planet — she doesn’t need to hear any more details before her answer is yes. Sure, jungle heat isn’t what she’s used to, but it’s better than  _ snow _ .

“It’s a supply run,” Poe says from under his X-Wing. BB8 beeps at him and he adjusts a little. “Better?” BB8 beeps confirmation, and Poe resumes whatever he’s doing. “Anyway — supply run. Pretty simple. An anonymous ally has offered us supplies and if it’s a trap, we trust you to get out alive.”

“Thanks for that,” Rey says.

“No problem. You’ll need a partner.”

“I’ll take Finn.” She’s getting to know everyone pretty well — not hard, since there’s only a couple dozen Resistance members left — but she doesn’t feel particularly close to anyone yet, especially since a lot of them seem to admire her a lot. She’s not used to being looked up to, and it’s a little uncomfortable.

“No can do, he’s tied up here. What about Rose?”

“Rose?” She tries to keep the uncertainty out of her voice. Rose is… nice, sure, but she’d gotten so excited upon their meeting that Rey had left feeling like she’d just met a fan, and she doesn’t like that feeling.

“Hey.” Poe slides out from under the X-Wing and pushes his goggles onto his forehead. His face is covered with engine grease, with the outline of goggles around his eyes. BB8 takes a tool from his hand — from this angle, Rey can’t see what it is — and hands him another. He takes it, but doesn’t go back under immediately. “Rose gets excited, but she’s good at what she does. You run into trouble, you can trust her to have your back.”

“I believe you.” And she’s a little surprised to find that she does. Maybe it’s the Force talking, who knows.

“Good.” Poe slides back under, pushing his goggles down as he does so, and there’s a flash or two of light before he slides out again and stands up, stretching. BB8 ducks underneath and beeps approval. “Tomorrow, then.”

*

The ship they’re taking is a jalopy. Rey almost cries when she sees the patterns of rust that cover the whole thing.

“Will this even make it to Kashyyyk?” Rose asks, dubious, as Rey runs her hands down a particularly bad patch of rust. Chunks of it rain to the ground.

“‘Course it will,” says Poe with no real conviction. “And you’re both mechanics, right? If you have a problem, you can fix it.”

“Do you have some tools you can lend us?” Rey asks, dusting off her fingers. She’s heard of people getting badly sick from touching rust; she doesn’t want to risk it. “In case we do have an issue.”

“I’ll grad a toolkit,” Poe says. “Are you both ready to go? The contact gave us a week and it’ll take the rest of our time just to get there.”

“I am,” Rey says. Rose nods and gives a thumbs-up to Poe. He ducks out to get the toolkit, and Rey boards the ship, almost against her better judgement. The ramp sways under her feet.

Inside isn’t quite as bad. The cockpit seems workable and clean, ready enough to fly, and there’s also a tiny galley, a refresher, and a cabin with two beds and barely enough room to turn around. Rey throws her bag on the top bunk and goes back to the cockpit just in time for Poe to return with the toolkit. Poe holds it out to her, but Rose beats her to it, and takes it with a smile before tucking it into a cupboard.

“Good luck, guys!” Poe says, and it’s forced, even for him. He pauses, and adds, “May the Force be with you,” before retreating. When Rey closes the ramp behind him, it grinds and clangs like it’s going to fall off, and she winces.

Rose takes the copilot’s seat as Rey goes through standard captain’s check. Finding everything fine — or, well, at least in good enough condition that it’s not going to fall apart as soon as they take off — she lifts them off the ground. Aside from one rather distressing wobble, they make it out of the hangar without incident.

Once they’re out of orbit, Rey’s hand falls on the hyperspace lever. She hesitates, and Rose says, “Did anyone check the hypercore?”

“I don’t know.” Rey eyes the lever warily. “Not much of a choice, though, is there?” She pushes it down, and the air seems to warp around them, shoving Rey back in her seat and pulling back the skin on her face for a moment. Then, with a rattle, the ship stabilizes.

“I’m not sure I like this ship,” Rose says after a moment of stunned silence between them, and Rey laughs.

“Me neither.”

*

It’s two days to Kashyyyk. During that time, Rey comes to realize how very off her initial impression of Rose was. Her mind works like a mechanic’s — like Rey’s own. She’s passionate, practical, and a true believer in the cause.

Rey likes her. Rey likes her a  _ lot _ . She’s never thought much about her taste, but she realizes, on the second night, as they cheerfully discuss engine repairs and prepare meal packets, that Rose is pretty much exactly it. The realization makes her freeze in place, and Rose asks her what’s wrong.

“Nothing,” she says, frantically searching her memory for rules of courtship. On Jakku, where resources were scarce, the most romantic thing that could be done — according to some of the gossip Rey had overheard — was gifts of food. “Would you like my portion?”

Rose blinks at her, baffled. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“Um.” Rey feels herself going red. “Yes. Right.” They finish making the meal in slightly awkward silence, and when they’re finished, Rey escapes to the cockpit and hits her head lightly against the wall a few times.

Later that night, when they’re working on the engine together — it requires twice-daily maintenance, they’ve discovered, if they don’t want it to overheat and possibly explode — the silence breaks, and it feels like they’re back to normal.

*

The exit from hyperspace is  _ rough _ .

Rey’s alone in the cockpit, since Rose is watching the engine so she can pour in coolant if needed, and for a few moments, as the ship shakes so hard she’s worried it’ll break apart, she’s half-convinced that she’s going to die.

Then the shaking stops, and for a moment, she can see the planet below them. It’s beautiful, a brilliant green with clouds like brushstrokes painted over. They’re in atmosphere, now, getting closer—

And then everything goes dark, and Rey hears a screamed swear word from Rose as they start to fall.

The dashboard is totally dead. Rey flips switches and pulls handles and the lights and the mechanics below are totally dead. Temporary power loss, or complete engine failure, she doesn’t know — either option is bad.

There’s nothing she can do from here. She makes her way back to where Rose is pouring coolant into the steaming engine and coughing her lungs out. The engine overheated and fried a circuit, probably, but she doesn’t know if they have time to fix it before they hit the ground and smash like bugs under a boot.

“Just try!” Rose yells, and Rey realizes she’s been talking out loud in her panic. It’s fine. She grabs some extra wire and some pliers and opens the panel that’s smoking the most.

It’s delicate, difficult work under the best of circumstances. With the ship falling rapidly and tilting from side to side, with her light source — a handlight that Rose is holding above her head — bouncing all around, and her hands being hit by electric burns, it feels nearly impossible.

The fall takes almost two minutes. With seconds to spare, Rey manages to make a connection, and the power flares to life. Not much — the new connection is sparking, melting — but it’s enough to save them. She hopes. She stumbles back to the cockpit and grabs the wheel, steers them towards a gap between trees.

The power flickers out again when they’re nearly at the ground. When they slam into the forest floor, she can hear the ship splintering to bits around them, but they’re alive.

They’re alive. It has to count for something.

*

Rose sends up a flare. The trees around them are so tall, covered so thickly in leaves that Rey isn’t sure it’ll make much of a difference, but if there’s one thing this low-tech jalopy has in spades, it’s loose flares. They’d found them under one of the beds on the first day.

It doesn’t speak much to the ship’s capabilities, which was plain then and clearer still now as Rey picks bugs off her bare arms and tries to connect the comms system to any sort of power. Engine, warp, even solar would be good enough for a couple of transmissions, but nothing is working.

The ship is beyond repair. The bottom is crushed like an empty drink can, tears in the sides going all the way up to the windows and door. The cockpit is mostly pulverized. It’d taken Rey nearly an hour to extract anything that could possibly conduct power.

It’s not much. Her cobbled-together comms system is still dead.

“Let me try,” Rose says, coming over to wear Rey is sitting on a fallen log. She carefully extracts the mess of wires from Rey’s hands and starts to fiddle with it. She pulls out extra wires from her pocket, hooks up the battery from her handlight, and within a few minutes, the comms system is awake, blinking with tiny red emergency lights.

“How did you do that?” Rey manages as she stares at the perfectly functional comm. “How—”

“I need to use it before it dies,” Rose says, and fiddles with the cord, trying to find a signal. The signal indicator turns green and Rose grins, satisfied. “Okay.”

She types in a short message to command — well, probably Poe, since he’s in charge of this mission — and disconnects the battery to preserve power.

“So. How long can we survive here?”

*

A few hours later, Rose plugs the battery back in to the comm to check for a reply. There is one:  _ your contact is coming to you _ .

“That seems a little ominous,” Rey says. Rose shrugs, disconnects the battery, and puts it away in her bag.

They’re building a shelter. They’d had no idea if rescue was even on its way, and the sun was slowly setting; Rey had pointed out that the bugs and wildlife might get a lot more violent at night, so they’d started building. Kashyyyk’s massive wroshyr trees have plenty of fallen branches and the ground is covered in vines; constructing a basic shelter wasn’t as difficult as it might’ve been somewhere else.

It’s good to know that help is coming and they won’t have to live in it for the foreseeable future. Rey thinks it’ll hold out wind, and maybe some bugs, but it’s lucky the sky is cloudless as it slowly darkens: Rey’s almost certain that the shelter wouldn’t hold up against more than a very light rainfall.

Rey drags the thin mattresses and insubstantial blankets out of the ruined ship and into the shelter as the night comes. They’re so low beneath the tree canopy that it happens quickly — one moment the sky is darkening a bit, the next there’s no light at all. As Rey arranges their beds, the only light is another flare, jammed in the corner and pointing away from the flammable branches.

Rose ducks into the shelter when Rey is almost finished with the beds. “Poe says that the contact is willing to help fix our ship so we can get back to base,” she says as greeting, and then she notices what Rey’s doing. “I think we need to share.”

“What?”

“It can get pretty cold here at night. We should probably push the mattresses together and share body heat.” In the dim light, it’s hard to tell, but Rey thinks she might be blushing.

“Okay,” she says. She can’t really understand any kind of embarrassment here — sure, she’s never done it before, but sharing body heat seems perfectly logical.

*

It starts getting cold a couple hours later, and since the contact won’t be able to pick them up until the morning, Rose informs Rey that they’re going to bed. It’s more awkward than Rey expected. They’re back to back, wearing all the clothes they brought, the blankets cocooning both of them. Rey can feel Rose breathing as they both try to sleep, and can’t stop thinking about kissing her.

It takes Rey a long time to go to sleep, but judging by how long it takes Rose’s breathing to slow and even out, she’s not alone.

*

Rey is woken the next morning by muffled Shyriiwook, and she sits up, dazed and shaking off a dream about slowly drowning in freezing sand. Rose is gone, so she stumbles out of the shelter to see her greeting a Wookiee.

“Our contact,” Rose says, and how is she already so awake and chipper? Rey doesn’t understand how  _ she _ managed to oversleep, for that matter. “You can speak Shyriiwook, right?”

“Right.” It’s one of the reasons she’s on this mission.

“I’m the contact,” says the Wookiee. “I can help fix your ship. And I have the supplies you came for.”

The contact doesn’t give her name — helping them is a big enough danger, so Rey doesn’t blame her — but she’s a very fast worker, and her physical strength combined with Rey and Rose’s mechanical skills make quick work of the outer body of the ship. When Rey steps back to look at it, hours of work later, she thinks it’s probably in better shape now than it was when they left. They load the supplies onto the ship, and then they’re done. It’s just the wiring now, and most of it is still intact.

“One more night, probably,” Rose says once the contact has bid farewell. It’s starting to get dark already. Rey agrees, and they open one of the boxes to get out two dinners. Rey starts a fire — a skill she’d picked up fairly quickly, and that she’s grateful for now — and as it gets darker, they end up talking.

Rose talks about her sister, and how she grew up under the heel of the First Order, how she’ll do anything it takes to make the galaxy free again. Rey talks about Jakku, and the Force, and how it feels, sometimes, like the weight of the galaxy is on her shoulders.

It’s late, and the fire is down to embers, and Rose has yawned four times in the last five minutes but Rey doesn’t want it to end.

“We should go to bed—” Rose says, and Rey grabs her hand, without really thinking it through. Rose’s hand is warm, and built for fixing things; Rey feels like her brain is short-circuiting.

“Rey?” Rose says hesitantly.

“Can I kiss you?” Rey asks, and immediately wants to shrivel up in embarrassment. She’s about to pull away and apologize when Rose nods.

It’s not good kiss, Rey’s pretty sure, but she doesn’t have anything to compare it to. Rose’s lips are warm and chapped, but they’re both hesitant, a little afraid to go any further.

It’s not a good kiss, but Rey finds herself smiling when she pulls away. She can’t remember the last time she smiled like this.

The next kiss is better, and the next is better than that.

By morning, Rey is pretty sure she’s an expert.


End file.
